This week's TIME Magazine issue had an article "Man Makes Life" that had a line within that caught my attention:

...nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are ... [in the same way that] digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear.

This struck a chord with what I read in the cover article in a recent past issue of SEED Magazine ("The Future of Science .. is Art?"). This article suggested that abstract ideas represented in concrete artwork (music, sculpture, drawings..) are more easily studied than the theoretical concepts and math themselves.

This article suggested that the best way to advance science (by leaps) is to mix the know-how of scientists with the know-how of artists: let the artists help visualize or hear what the scientist describes which allows everyone to study the subject on a concrete level; studying objects outside of the math and theories allows the mind to make abstract leaps of faith which can further be examined outside math and paper.

However, I would think that building an organism by developing against its DNA is more akin to writing raw binary or, more parallel, assembly code to program a computer. Rich development environments exist to separate the human from the messy code, and the goal here maybe ought to be to build that development suite before cranking out weird, mal-formed subspecies of randomness.

Side note: Incidentally, SEED also had a nice side-article on how RNA is as important if not more in determining what traits from the DNA make it in to the next evolution of a species... it opens a whole new exploration of DNA/RNA programming as described above..